Some time ago, I participated in an article on unforgettable clean manufacturing stories. I was joined by contributors Ken Goldstein, Lise Laurin, and Scott Mackler who generously offered tales of mishaps and snafus they had witnessed over their careers. The article itself was the brain child of Dorothy Rosa, then Editor-in- Chief of A2C2 Magazine (later renamed Controlled Environments).

Like war stories, these anecdotes are worth airing again to chuckle over and to, hopefully, not repeat except in the telling.

“I'VE GOT IT COVERED!”
A new operator had been recently assigned to work in a semiconductor wafer fab. After attending protocol classes, she was determined to do everything in her power to protect her sensitive products. When the lots on which she had worked showed an increase in particle defects, QC asked her to demonstrate her material handling technique. Happy to cooperate, she showed the visitors how carefully she carried each wafer in her left hand...while holding her right hand over the wafer, to “protect” it from falling particles.

WHERE THERE’S SMOKE...
A semiconductor fab built in 1968 employed true vertical unidirectional (through-the-floor) airflow. This had been accomplished by pouring a concrete slab with rectangular cutouts at frequent intervals. Steel grates across the cutouts permitted foot traffic while allowing air to flow downward. Fiberglass pans below caught liquid spills; debris, of course, accumulated in them. Broken wafers, pieces of tubing, lengths of electrical wire, nuts and bolts were surely to be expected...but cigarette butts?

“MMM, MMM, GOOD!”
Before there was any gowning in semiconductor fabs, workers often ate lunch at their workstations. In one instance, they enjoyed their mid-shift repast approximately four feet from the load stations of horizontal three-stack diffusion furnaces processing 100 mm (4 in.) wafers. One day, an operator decided to use one of the tubes in “his” diffusion furnace to heat a can of pork and beans for lunch. Unfortunately, he left it in too long, and the resulting explosion left an unspeakable mess inside the process tool.'